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Libertarians and the "easy rescue" -- a better litmus test than trolleys or a wedding cake


Let's assume a libertarian community, and visualize a swimming pool on private property (what other kind would there be?) at which a lone individual sits in a deck chair by the edge, reading a book and working on a tan.

This person is a guest of the property owner, not the owner of the pool.

At some point during this fine July afternoon, a four-year-old child wanders into the area. The child is not related to the property owner or the guest, has not been invited onto the property. He or she has somehow gotten away from parents and been led by curiosity to wander the neighborhood ... finding the pool ...

... and falls into the deep end ... and can't swim.

I don't know if the guest can swim or not -- it's actually immaterial because there is one of those very long poles with the scoop on the end and a life preserver, both sitting right beside his/her chair. It is likely that the guest doesn't even have to stand up to rescue the child, just reach down and pick up the pole or toss in the floatation device for the child to grab.

This is, by definition, an "easy rescue." There is no risk of physical harm to the guest, and literally only the most minimal of efforts necessary to save the child. He or she might not even have to close the book.

Instead, our guest sits there, reading, while the child drowns. The guest neither attempts a rescue nor calls for help.

To be clear: the guest is not the property owner, does not personally know the child, initiates neither force nor fraud against the child, but simply ... does nothing.

What, in my hypothetical libertarian community, would, should, or could be the consequences for the guest who allows a four-year-old child to drown without even attempting the easy rescue?

About five years ago I posed this scenario in a number of libertarian social media groups to see what would happen next. Before you make the jump to find out what they said, take a minute to work out your own libertarian response, both in general and if you were one of the parents of the now-dead child.

The first thing that happened was that some commenters immediately added "facts" to my situation in order to remove any personal responsibility from the guest for inaction.

The property owner could be sued in a libertarian court if there wasn't a fence or something like that to keep others out. If there was, and the guest hadn't left it open, then the guest was not responsible for the child getting in, the child's parents were, for losing control. At no point in this situation does the guest have any responsibility to take action. Therefore there could not be any consequences for the guest.

[This is a conflation of comments from about ten different people. Notice they've added the issue of a fence and/or parental negligence in order to get the guest off the hook. For all we are given in the original situation, the child could have wandered off after his/her parents were killed in a car crash.]

Others took a different tack:

The guest is scum as a human being, but cannot be required by any law to rescue the child because the guest has no defined personal responsibility for that child.

And that part is generally true in society today. If you hit a pedestrian while driving you car -- whether the accident was their fault or yours -- by law you cannot leave the scene until law enforcement arrives (or it is "hit and run") but you are under no legal obligation to provide the victim first aid, either.

You can let the person bleed out before you call 911 as long as you don't leave. (Which, for some soulless people might be a good strategy if there were no other witnesses.)

Note; you can still be held accountable for injuring the witness so badly that he or she was at risk of dying, but the law does not require you to save that life.

Many libertarians suggested that the "easy rescue" is an oxymoron insofar as libertarian society is concerned, because in our current society there might not be any consequences for the guest, either, and it is not incumbent on any libertarian to prove that in all aspects their proposed society would always be better for everyone.

At that point I asked them to consider their reaction as the parent of the drowned child coming onto the scene a few minutes later. 100% of libertarians who responded to this (I think there were about 9 or 10) said that if I did what I said I'd personally do (immediately attempt to beat this useless lump of human shit to death with the rescue pole), that I would be the person committing the wrong in this situation.

After all, I initiated force against a person who was neither directly or indirectly responsible for my child falling into the pool, and who had broken neither any law nor tenet of libertarian philosophy.

I was, the consensus appeared to be, the actual monster in the situation. 

(Fair warning: in this situation in real life I can pretty much guarantee you that my atavistic tendencies would take control, and if you were the guest your relatives might have the consolation of seeing me go to prison, but the guest would still be dead. I am not kidding here.)

OK, so then I pivoted and noticed that most people did admit that the guest, while not legally responsible for the child's death, was a total shit-loss as a human being, which was sad, but nothing could be done.

I proposed a libertarian solution to this problem, first assuming that the parent arriving on the scene had not beaten the guest to death.

Instead, the parent recounts the story throughout the community, far and wide, naming the guest and sticking exactly to the facts. The parent approaches the guest's employer with the story and asks if this is the kind of person that they want to have as the face of their company. The parent approaches any civic organizations and attempts to persuade them to cancel the guest's membership. The parent even goes to local businesses to suggest that the owners refuse to do business with any person who would simply allow a child to drown with attempting an easy rescue.

In short, the parent would -- by telling the truth of the incident -- attempt to convince enough members of the community to shun the guest as to make it impossible for that person to keep living there.

The libertarians to whom I posed this scenario were -- to a person -- outraged by this strategy. They saw me as persecuting (and even slandering or libeling) someone who had not broken any laws. (Note: as long as I told the truth only, it could not be slander or libel by definition.)

It was fascinating to witness the intensity with which these libertarians converted the parent into the villain of the piece, and accused the parent of being un-libertarian (or non-libertarian, or whatever the word would be).

I disagreed. In my scenario the parent had neither initiated force nor fraud against the guest. Only the truth had been told, and since the libertarian credo is that all merchants and voluntary organizations can refuse to associate with anybody else "for any reason or no reason at all," then I could not possibly have violated libertarian ideals, either.

In a libertarian society wherein I could not hold the guest legally accountable, I would have every right to try to hold that person morally accountable by convincing the rest of the community to shun him or her.

My position as a libertarian is this: as human beings we are accountable for our actions, which we broadly conceive of as agreeing not to initiate force or fraud, but we also bear responsibility for certain of our inactions.

If my neighbor is out of town and I see his house burning, and I don't call it in but passively watch it burn to the ground -- guess what? I am scum. 

I don't want laws that require people to act, just like I don't want prior restraint on free speech.

But I do believe that any society needs to develop consequences -- formal or informal -- for those who cannot meet the barest minimum of what could be considered moral and ethical conduct. 

(Being a smart-ass I might argue they'd already committed fraud by pretending to be human beings..)

But that's me. What about you?

What moral responsibility (if any) did the guest have? What consequences could a libertarian community impose if those responsibilities were not exercised?

I think a functional human community of any ideological bent needs to be able to answer that kind of question. You've now seen my response.

What's yours?


A note: I did not make up this easy rescue scenario. I first read it in Tal Scriven's intriguing but difficult book, Wrongness, Wisdom, and Wilderness: Toward a Libertarian Theory of Ethics and the Environment (1997). I don't think he invented it, either, but I am not sure how old it is.

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